


a promise and a prayer

by guiltylights



Category: One Piece
Genre: Baratie Arc (One Piece), Gen, Pre-Canon, a vent fic for myself more than anything else, also set during, an exploration into Sanji's ideas of self-sacrifice and dreams, kind of a character study fic, there's one nameless original character who is there as a foil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 05:35:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17482193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guiltylights/pseuds/guiltylights
Summary: Join my crew, boy,the captain had said, all shark-like grin and devious hungry confidence,join my crew, and we could conquer the seas.Sanji, aged sixteen and still too skinny for the black pressed suit he had slotted himself into, had bit down onto the filter of his cigarette and said nothing at all.When Sanji had been sixteen, someone had asked him to go out to sea with him.





	a promise and a prayer

**Author's Note:**

> [Time started: 19th Jan 19, 6:56pm;– ]
> 
> Have a tiny little thing that I had to cough out of my system.

.

.

.

.

.

When Sanji had been sixteen, someone had asked him to go out to sea with him. On the top-most deck of the Baratie, when the sun had strung itself high and searing bright into the painfully blue sky, Sanji remembers staring out over to where the sky had met the sea in one long smudge of a line in the distance, so far ahead that it had seemed insurmountable as dream, yet at the same time close as a leap of faith.

It had been the captain of some crew that had stopped by the Baratie for a meal, having heard the renown of the floating restaurant even from when they had been sailing in the North Blue. They’d gotten into a scuffle with Marines that had been dining in the restaurant at the same time, as pirates were wont to do – but this time, instead of letting Patty or Zeff deal with the troublemakers, Sanji had intervened for once, incensed as he had been with them destroying the tablecloths in their battle and ruining the lovely romantic atmosphere he had set up for a particular group of ladies onboard. Knocking people out from both sides with kicks and quicksilver legwork, Sanji had booted all of them out through the doors of the Baratie to land in an ungraceful heap on the narrow wooden boardwalk that separated restaurant and sea, and stood over them hulking as a scarecrow and scowling, viciously smoking on a cigarette, figure tensed at the ready should a serious fight had broken out.

And the pirate captain had laughed. Sanji remembered that. He had laughed.

After everything had been settled and dealt with by Zeff’s incensed authority – the Marines had been sent packing, the pirates were kicked out of the restaurant by an unapologetic Patty, and Sanji himself had been punished with two weeks’ worth of dishwashing duty despite having _broken up the fight in the first place, you crappy geezer, if anything you should fucking be awarding me_ – the captain had found Sanji up in the top-most deck of the Baratie and said, _you’re strong._

 _Join my crew, boy,_ the captain had said, all shark-like grin and devious hungry confidence, _join my crew, and we could conquer the seas._  

Sanji, aged sixteen and still too skinny for the black pressed suit he had slotted himself into, had bit down onto the filter of his cigarette and said nothing at all. There had been the utmost confidence in the captain’s eyes. He didn’t think he would be rejected, Sanji could tell – for a restless soul always recognised another, and the captain must’ve seen the way Sanji’s bones hummed impatiently under his skin on even his good days, seen the anxious twitch to Sanji’s shoulders that always had Sanji leaning halfway from the windows and halfway towards them as well, as though he couldn’t bear to be neither too near nor too far to where the ocean laid waiting. At age sixteen Sanji had yet to perfect the way he wore his own heart on his sleeve, too awkward and too desperate for it to seem as picturesque as distant performance, and Sanji hated that about himself, hated the way he couldn’t hide the hunger in his eyes that no amount of love nor starvation could purge. The captain must’ve seen the way Sanji’s eyelids jumped when he mentioned _adventure,_ when he spoke of dreams and victory and of finding the thing that one’s heart desired, and that’s why the captain had looked at Sanji in premature cocky triumph, Sanji was sure, one palm upturned to the sky as if presenting Sanji the world, ripe for the taking, _look, boy, this is what you could have, if you agree._

And Sanji had leaned against the railing and clenched his teeth hard around his cigarette at the offer, because _fuck,_ he wanted to. All Blue laid glittering in his mind’s eye, mythic and fantastic and beautiful in all its glory and its treasures, and Sanji ached with so much want that he thought that he might die of it. But as gulls circled overhead in the sky and flew low towards the dipped horizon, Sanji felt the grain of the wooden railings of the Baratie weathered coarse from brine and wind underneath his fingertips, knew that there was only one right answer.

‘No,’ he had said, mouth a grim line steadfast in equal measure in both its determination and its regret, and that had been that.

Because even though Sanji had been a boy with a dream too big for himself, Sanji was still a boy. A boy with a family, with a restaurant rocking beneath his feet that he had to pledge and repay a life to, for the life that had been given to him during those long terrible days on a rocky island during which Sanji had learned what it meant to be truly empty. Cracking a brittle jaw, staring out to a horizon crushingly unchanged by the furl of a sail – and then the even more crushing realisation, afterwards, of the things Zeff had given up and given to him for Sanji to be able to stand on his own two feet here today, the love given to a mouthy brat that hadn’t known his own place gasping in its weight. The clumping of Zeff’s wooden prosthetic around the Baratie, over the years, had become Sanji’s own double-edged version of a promise and a prayer: _this is where I will belong. This is where I will stay. The Baratie is my home, and I am here to serve and protect it._ All Blue in the horizon, tauntingly far away; and Sanji had turned his back to it, skinny shoulders high and defensive in his still ill-fitting suit. _No._  

And then that had been that. The captain, shocked though he had been at the refusal, had left, for he had no use for a crewmember whose loyalty would be as fitful as the tides. As their ship had sailed and disappeared over the horizon, Sanji had stood outside and watched it go, smoke and bitter vitriol burning and coating his lungs as he chain-smoked his way through an entire packet of cigarettes, vices obsessively developed and unhealthy even then. He’d convinced himself he had made the right decision, really, because the captain had not asked him to join in a way that said he mattered; one palm upturned to the sky instead of outstretched to his figure, and so Sanji was better off where he was. _Have you ever heard about All Blue,_ Sanji imagined himself asking that captain, and thought he might choke on the hilarious impossibility of it.

When Sanji could no longer see the ship from the deck and had no more cigarettes left to spare, he had turned on his heel, and clicked back inside the restaurant. Zeff’s eyes caught onto him the minute he pushed through the wide doors, and Sanji ignored the way that they were tight with something like disapproval and regret, stubborn as he was in his self-sacrifice and bitterly smug validation. This was where he belonged, yes, Sanji was convinced; re-tying and knotting the tie around his neck so tight that it hurt to breathe, and discretely folding up the sleeves of his suit that was still a bit too long, Sanji glared at his old geezer, tossed up a middle finger in both habit and childish defiance, and slouched his way back into the kitchens. After all, there was the dinner rush to serve.

His hands were pushed into his pockets to hide the imperceptible shaking of his fists. Sanji shook the hair over his eyes, and went to prepare the ingredients for the first meals of the evening.

.

.

.

Three years later, and Sanji is nineteen. He’s finally grown into the planes of his suit, and has learned how to wear it like it’s tailor-made, the same way he has learned to wear his own yearning hunger like a feline grace as darkly polished as his leather shoes. When someone else comes crashing through the doors asking Sanji to join his pirate crew, all bright smiles and indomitable, incorrigible personality, Sanji finds himself thinking irritably, _ah. You._ And then he thinks it again, later on, only this time in disbelief and – against all odds – hope, when he watches Don Krieg crash onto the decks of the Baratie and get knocked out unconscious.  _Ah. You._

‘Have you ever heard about All Blue?’ The question pushes itself out of him, afterwards, natural and unbidden as anything, and Luffy hasn’t but he listens anyway, grins wide at the way talking about his dream makes Sanji’s face crumple into a delight that makes him look like the nineteen-year-old that he is, and for once in his life Sanji decides to let himself dream.

Because see, the thing is, is that when Sanji had been sixteen, someone had already asked him to go out to sea with him. And when Luffy barges his way into Sanji’s life and asks him the same thing, again, Sanji is already prepared to say the same thing, again. _No._ And that would be that. And he did say no. Multiple times. But he hadn’t thought to factor in the love of the rest of the people at the Baratie, of Zeff, all of who want nothing more than to see him happy even if it means that he would be gone. He hadn’t thought to factor in the way Luffy stretches a hand out in his direction, at the way Luffy looks at him as if he would be the cook to bring Luffy to victory and no-one else, at the way Luffy calls him by his name. _Sanji, join my crew!_

Later on, when all the tears have been said and done and he is stepping onto the small boat that is waiting to take him over the seas and into the future, Sanji understands that he _had_ made the right decision, three years ago. For when he had been sixteen and wanting and self-loathing in that want, there had been nothing that captain could have offered that would have been enough to stop Sanji from regretting his decision had he chosen to leave. It has taken him three years and a whole kitchen’s worth of wasted soup for him to realise that to chase his dream is not equivalent to abandoning what he would be leaving behind, and that the weight of Zeff’s sacrifice shouldn’t be matched with his own brand of self-compromise. It’s not that he is dissatisfied with what he has. It’s not that he would ever forget what Zeff has given him. It’s that he has something else that he also wants, something that he wants to accomplish more than anything he ever has in his life, and now it is time, finally, for him to take a leap into that horizon, for himself. For Zeff, as well. For both of them.

And Luffy is the only captain that could’ve brought him here. Luffy, who is the only one that Sanji would ever choose to follow. Sanji knows, now more than ever, that he had made the right decision. He hadn’t belonged to that boat from he had been sixteen. He belongs on this boat, now, as a Straw-Hat pirate. Right here, right now, is when it is right for him to leave and see the world. Not a moment too soon, or a moment too late. Call it destiny, call it coincidence, but Sanji feels somehow that all his life has led him up to this moment.

Sanji steps onto the boat, and casts his eyes out to the distance where the horizon meets the sea.

It’s finally time to go.

.

.

.

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I intended for this fic to be like maybe 800 words at best HOW did it evolve into this monster.
> 
> Unpolished for the most part, as this is more of a vent fic than anything else. I’ve always related very much to Sanji, particularly when he first appears in the Baratie, in ways that are uncomfortable for me to admit. I’m in a hard position in my life right now, where I’m nowhere close to where I want to be and hating everything a little for it, and I guess I needed something to help let it out of my system a bit. I’m not sure if it really worked, as Sanji took hold of this fic and ran with it so this fic speaks more for Sanji through me than for me, but there is a certain comfort I find in Sanji and the miracles he gets to give and receive after all that he’s been through. (I don’t mean to say that the Baratie is a bad place for Sanji, though, if that’s what this implied. It isn’t. It would never be.) 
> 
> I might need to write more fics like this in the future, depending, so there might be a bigger outpouring of sanji-related fics from me than before. Or there might not be. Who knows. The human heart is fickle. 
> 
> Anyway, if you liked the fic, leave comments and kudos please! Comments especially, they make a writer’s day. I also have a [tumblr](http://guilty-lights.tumblr.com/) if you wanna come by and say hi! 
> 
> [Time ended: 20th Jan 19, 4.05pm;– ]


End file.
